To describe Adam Gidwitz’s mid­dle-grade nov­el, Max in the Land of Lies, as ambi­tious would be an under­state­ment. A sequel to Max in the House of Spies (2024), about a Jew­ish child enlist­ed by British intel­li­gence to infil­trate Nazi Ger­many, it fol­lows Max on his dual mis­sion. Offi­cial­ly charged with using his skills with radio tech­nol­o­gy to uncov­er the secrets of Nazi pro­pa­gan­da, Max’s per­son­al mis­sion is to locate his par­ents, who sent him to Eng­land to ensure his safe­ty. Gid­witz builds the nar­ra­tive with unpre­dictable plot twists, ambigu­ous char­ac­ters, and spec­u­la­tion about the psy­chol­o­gy of fas­cism, cre­at­ing a com­plex work with a vul­ner­a­ble but deter­mined thir­teen-year-old boy at its cen­ter. Max’s leg­endary helpers, Stein the dyb­buk and Berg the kobold, are also back, strate­gi­cal­ly deliv­er­ing dos­es of Jew­ish humor and engag­ing in ongo­ing dia­logue about Max’s fate.

Car­ry­ing with him his watch­mak­er father’s lessons about tak­ing apart and reassem­bling time­pieces, Max tries to approach his ter­ri­fy­ing sit­u­a­tion with calm cal­cu­la­tion. Yet learn­ing about the dis­ap­pear­ance of his par­ents when he arrives at his for­mer Berlin home is a wrench­ing expe­ri­ence. He is also immersed in the con­stant state of sus­pi­cion that char­ac­ter­izes Ger­many under Nazi rule. Like Max, the read­er is nev­er sure about the loy­al­ties or motives of those who Max encoun­ters. Mr. Pfeif­fer, the radio shop own­er with secrets of his own, seems improb­a­bly kind. Pas­tor Andreas is sym­pa­thet­ic but weak, ratio­nal­iz­ing his com­pli­ance with the state while serv­ing as a Chris­t­ian cler­gy­man. Even Hans Fritzsche, the radio per­son­al­i­ty whose voice deliv­ers lies on his pop­u­lar pro­gram, is dif­fi­cult to decipher.

Radio, both its tech­no­log­i­cal aspect and its cul­tur­al mean­ings, plays a key part in Max’s sto­ry; through­out the book, there are details about actu­al mod­els as well as metaphors about radio’s end­less poten­tial. Giv­en the oppor­tu­ni­ty to work on an impor­tant set, Max declares that ​“This isn’t a box of bolts and wires! … This is where lead gets turned into gold!” Dic­ta­tors have destroyed the utopi­an vision of radio as a means of broad­en­ing access to cul­ture, instead con­vert­ing it into an invalu­able means for dis­sem­i­nat­ing lies.

Gidwitz’s explo­ration of moral respon­si­bil­i­ty in the shad­ow of ter­ror rais­es many ques­tions. In a detailed after­word, the author acknowl­edges that some read­ers may be trou­bled by his attempt to ​“human­ize Nazis.” He explains that por­tray­ing the per­pe­tra­tors and their sup­port­ers as total­ly aber­rant would actu­al­ly leave us unpre­pared to con­front all the human adap­ta­tions to evil. Yet at times, the focus on abus­es com­mit­ted by the Allies tends to neu­tral­ize the atroc­i­ties intrin­sic to the Nazi regime. There are many dis­cus­sions about the evils of British impe­ri­al­ism and Amer­i­can racism, with even Max ques­tion­ing ​“if he was on the right side of this war.” Berg, with his sig­na­ture sar­casm, looks for­ward to their return to Eng­land: ​“Then maybe we could get out of the land of Nazis and back to the land of very well-behaved impe­ri­al­ists.” At sev­er­al points in the sto­ry, and in his after­word, Gid­witz is care­ful to negate the idea of moral equiv­a­len­cy, and does draw a clear dis­tinc­tion between the two sides. Sim­i­lar­ly, the author’s ref­er­ences to oth­er groups sub­ject to per­se­cu­tion is both real­is­tic and rel­e­vant, yet the Nazi’s unique obses­sion with elim­i­na­tion­ist anti­semitism, lead­ing to the near-total anni­hi­la­tion of Europe’s Jews, should still be clear in this pow­er­ful sto­ry of hatred and resistance.